Craigart14

Some time ago, I forget exactly when, I wrote a review of The God Who Wasn't There for Amazon. I was browsing there a minute ago, and--foolishly--read a couple of responses to my review. One was actually a bit rude, and made a number of assertions that my reading in recent years suggests are untrue. I would really appreciate some commentary on this comment, part of which is posted below. I'm not continuing the discussion on Amazon, but I would like to know if the writer is correct regarding historical assertions, such as the idea that Ignatius quoted from 25 of the 27 NT books by 110 CE. It also seems as if he accepts all of the letters of "Paul" to have been written by a single author. Just curious. If someone could elucidate for me what the writer's train of thought might be or point me to some sources, I would really appreciate some discussion. So here's part of the comment: (I've deleted the ad hominem attacks.)

"There are historians that think Mark may have been first but there also historian that think Matthew or Luke was written first. Luke is a minority position but in the historians world Matthew has some very good arguments for it. Most linguists think Matthew was originally written in Aramaic and most of the sayings of Jesus in Luke appear to have been translated from Aramaic into Koine Greek, that would give credence to either a Q document or Matthew being written before Luke.

Only some of Jesus' saying sin Mark appears to have been translated from Aramaic but that makes the dating of Mark more problematic. I believe (this is my opinion only but held by many historians also) is that Mark and Matthew were written extremely close together, who was first we will never know.

>>> that Mark could not have been written before 70 AD, and was probably written much later, perhaps ca. 110 AD

The late dating of the gospels is the second foundational claim of group 2. Without pushing the gospels dating back, way far back, their claims will crumble also.

Secular historians scoff at these late dates for many reasons.

First let us pretend that Mark WAS written first, then Matthew used Mark and and Luke used Mark and Matthew to write his gospel. This is what group 2 tells how it happened.

PROBLEM: Most historians believe that Luke and Acts were the trial documents used for Paul's defense in Rome in 63 AD. There are numerous strong reasons for this but it would take to long to detail here. These are just some highlights.

Luke and Acts were written as a narrative first of Jesus then of Paul's work - it shows who Jesus was and why Paul followed him and what Paul did.

Luke and Acts are highly detailed, historical locations, political figures, even weather, depths in the Mediterranean Sea are noted, peculiar weather, the list goes on and on. Historians agree that the detail of the book could have only been written by a person who had observed these items and was contemporary of Paul and was with him on these trips.

The books narratives are extremely explicit but end abruptly at 61-62 AD with Paul in Jail awaiting trial in front of Ceaser. As was the law a Roman citizen, such as Paul could only present his case is he detailed trial documents. Acts very clearly is a biography of the early church and Paul's life missionary work all fits this idea very neatly.

So the bottom line is that historians conclude with a high probability that Luke was written in 61-62 AD and if Mark was before that then the idea that mark was written after 70 AD crumbles very easily.

The second problem with this post 70 AD number is that in all of the synoptic gospels and Acts have the temple still standing. One of Jesus' most audacious claims was that the temple, the most revered Jewish holy site, was going to be destroyed. When he spoke of this the Jewish Pharisee's tried to stone and kill Jesus. Throughout the gospels the writers continually point to the fulfilling of prophecy as proof that Jesus was who he said he was. Many even argue, not without merit, that the gospel writers were so zealous of showing that prophecy had been fulfilled that they misinterpreted prophecies and wrongly attached them to Jesus. With all of the zealotry why did none of the gospel writers mention the "greatest" prophecy that Jesus uttered had come true?

Logically dictates that they would have shouted this out in their books, or in the epistles but they are all ominously silent - WHY? The logical conclusion is that when these books were penned the temple was still standing. So the late dating argument of post 70AD seems to fail again.

But here we have the reviewer, regurgitating the talking points of the more extreme entities of group 2 and saying that Mark could have been written as late as 110. this pushes Luke and Acts back into the 150's or even later.

Do they have any proof of this????? NO
Is there historical proof that they were published earlier????? YES

In 95 AD Clement writing from Rome either directly quotes from or mentions Matthew, Mark, Luke, and 8 other New Testament books

In 107 AD Ignatius writing from Smyrna in Asia Minor either directly quotes from or mentions Mathew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts and 19 other New Testament Books

In 110 AD Polycarp, writing from Smyrna in Asia Minor either directly quotes from or mentions Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts and 13 other New Testament books.

By 110 AD 25 out of the 27 books of the New Testament have been quoted from or mentioned.

It's pretty hard to take any group that posits a book was written AFTER it was being quoted from. These historical facts are not hard to find, only someone with an extreme agenda and not interested in the truth would put forth the fraudulent claims that group 2 does on a regular basis.

>>> that none of the Biblical epistles say anything of Jesus' life on earth.

Even a casual cursory reading of the epistles by anyone wishing to check the veracity of this claim would prove that it is false.

There are 357 versus that explicitly talk about Jesus in the Epistles, just some of the highlights about Jesus you would glean from reading only the epistles are:

He was born of women,
Baptized,
Preached the gospel to men,
Ate food,
Had disciples,
Taught in the temple,
Healed the sick,
Was crucified by the Romans,
Suffered a painful death
Hung on a tree/cross, was entombed
Rose from the dead
Ascended to heaven.

It appears to me that the epistles say quite a bit about Jesus.

Forget the fact that one of the main arguments throughout the epistles is the writers continually urge the readers to speak to the eyewitnesses of Jesus.

If Jesus had been purely mythical why Paul did and the rest of the NT writers continually beseech people to speak to the eye-witnesses to back up there accounts???????

We also have to remember the epistles are mostly letters written to people, after Paul had visited - they were answering questions and concerns and were not biographies about Jesus.

If one read only the epistles and had the pre-formed notion that Jesus was mythological god - they would make absolutely no sense. Instead they only make sense in the light that Jesus was a real person."

Thoughts?

Craig

Toto

Could you add some formatting to indicate your words versus the critics, and which issues you are questioning?

The God Who Wasn't There (or via: amazon.co.uk)

show_no_mercy

Ignatius is heavily interpolated, so this defeats the major premise that "Ignatius" quotes 25 of the 27 books of the NT c. 110 CE. There's really no firm date for dating the entire Ignatian corpus solidly at c. 110 CE.

Why would he anyway? No NT book was considered holy scripture until around the mid 2nd century.

Craigart14

Most of the OP comes from one critic. I only wrote the set-up and the question "Thoughts?" at the bottom. Since I was cutting and pasting, I just put in quotation marks instead of using the forum QUOTE function.

Craig

Toto

This is all really confused, whoever said it. There are some of Jesus' words that are actually in Aramaic, but no evidence that the gospel as a whole was translated from Aramaic. The idea that any of the gospels were first written in Aramaic and then translated into Koine Greek is a distinct minority viewpoint.

I don't think you will find many actual historians with an opinion on how closely Mark and Matthew were written. Then general view is that Mark was written first; Matthew copied blocks of text from Mark, but also corrected some "errors."

No, secular historians do not scoff at relatively late dates for the gospels.

This is a lie. Only a few evangelical scholars believe this. The mainstream view is that Luke-Acts was written around 110 CE.

Another lie. Historians do not agree with this, and it is generally agreed that the details in Acts could have been written by anyone with a good library.

Acts is a historical novel about the founding of the early church, which smooths over divisions that we know existed and blames everything on the Jews.

Another lie. Luke-Acts is conservatively dated to 90-110 CE, after the fall of the Temple and well after Mark was written.

The gospels and Acts are all written about events happening a generation before the fall of the Temple, but there are allusions in them to prophecies that the Temple would fall that make no sense if it had not in fact happened.

1 Clement cannot be dated that precisely, and IIRC the mentions are not identified as coming from the gospels - they are words that could have been later incorporated into the gospels.

Ignatius' letters have been heavily interpolated. One cannot know exactly when those quotes were written.

Polycarp is generally dated to 120-140 CE

This has not been established.

These historical facts are disputed.

The epistles do not clearly locate Jesus on earth at a specific historical moment. This is different from mentioning Jesus, who might be a god or a spirit or a human who lived in a remote time for all we know.

Where does Paul refer to eyewitnesses to a historical Jesus? He refers to Jesus appearing to a variety of people in 1 Cor 15, but these were post-Resurrection appearances.

Not true. Of course, they make little sense as it is, since they are so heavily interpolated by competing points of view.

Craigart14

The following is from another reviewer at Amazon:

"There are 357 versus that explicitly talk about Jesus in the Epistles, just some of the highlights about Jesus you would glean from reading only the epistles are:

He was born of women,
Baptized,
Preached the gospel to men,
Ate food,
Had disciples,
Taught in the temple,
Healed the sick,
Was crucified by the Romans,
Suffered a painful death
Hung on a tree/cross, was entombed
Rose from the dead
Ascended to heaven.

It appears to me that the epistles say quite a bit about Jesus.

Forget the fact that one of the main arguments throughout the epistles is the writers continually urge the readers to speak to the eyewitnesses of Jesus."

My question here is are there so many references to Jesus in the epistles? Is this reviewer assuming that all the epistles were written by the same man, Paul? Are some of these references likely to be later insertions? I have read in a number of sources that only seven of the epistles were from "Paul."

The last point, that "the writers [of the epistles] continually urge the readers to speak to the eyewitnesses of Jesus," seems to me easily refuted. Those writers might well have realized that a search for eyewitnesses would come up empty, especially if, as Elvgard argues, the NT is a product of the Jewish diaspora, and if some of the epistles are later than the lifetime of Paul but the writers are, for narrative and evangelical purposes, setting themselves up as contemporaries of Paul and Jesus. The other reviewer argues elsewhere that in the Gospel stories, the Temple is still standing, which "proves" the accounts are from eyewitnesses contemporaneous with Jesus. However, if, say, Mark was written after the destruction of the Temple but marketed as an eyewitness account, then mentioning the destroyed Temple would be a sort of narrative suicide. How could "Mark" traveling with Jesus in 30 CE know that the Temple was razed 40 years later? Of course, a "Mark" writing in 70 CE could easily set his story in 30 CE and put "prophecies" in the mouth of his main character--especially "prophecies" that have already been "fulfilled." Imagine if Mark were writing today, and the prophecy concerned the destruction of the World Trade Center? Would Mark feel the need to inform his readers that the twin towers had, in fact, been destroyed?

By the way, Elvgard's book is a good read; he argues that Jesus was the Essenes' Teacher of Righteousness and lived and died ca. 100 BCE, that Paul and the other evangelists considered Him a spirit, not a man, and that the Gospel accounts are fictions written to combat the Gnostics, more specifically, the docetitists. Also, I'm nearly finished with McDonald's comparison of the NT and the ancient epics of Homer. Thought-provoking.

Craig

show_no_mercy

He was born of women, (Anti-Marcionite/docetic interpolation)
Baptized,(no)
Preached the gospel to men,(no)
Ate food,(interpolation of 1 Cor 11)
Had disciples,(not once does the Pauline corpus mention "disciples" that Jesus had)
Taught in the temple,(no)
Healed the sick,(no... unless the poster is arguing for Jesus being a deacon to the "circumcised" in Romans 15)
Was crucified by the Romans,(was crucified by the rulers [i.e. "archons"] of this age [i.e. "aeon"])
Suffered a painful death
Hung on a tree/cross, was entombed (theology)
Rose from the dead (theology)
Ascended to heaven.(theology)

Toto

There is a sort of consensus that only seven of the Pauline epistles were actually written by the same person (call him Paul.) There are very compelling reasons to think that even the genuine epistles were heavily interpolated, but this seems to be a real hot potato in the NT studies world.

There are many references to Christ Jesus, or Lord Jesus Christ in the epistles. But none of these definitely refer to a recently crucified person on earth. This is a highly contentious area.

Craigart14

I know that most of these assertions are theological and some are anti-Marcionite/docetic. My question is how many of these points are made in the writings of the early bishops or in the epistles? I'm wondering if the other reviewer was faithful to his sources, not whether the sources are "true." I consider the Jesus stories fiction--especially after reading Elvgard--derived from allegorical readings of OT verses, and I'm pretty impressed by McDonald's tracing of Homeric parallels. Paul and the Gnostics don't make many references to a physical Jesus, and the ones they do make don't seem to fit in context, so are probably later redactions. Just trying to understand the other guy's thinking. Certainty generally baffles me.

Craig

show_no_mercy

Born of a woman is from Galatians 4:4. This is a tautology since every person born is "born of a woman". Why would Paul write such a truism unless there were people arguing in its negative? Thus this part of Galatians might not have been written by Paul in the 1st century. What it refutes only existed in the 2nd.

There's nothing in any epistle written in the first century about Jesus being baptized.

Jesus never did any preaching according to any epistle written in the first century.

I assume "Ate food" is a reference to the possibly interpolated "Lord's Supper" in 1 Cor 11:17-34

No epistle in the first century mentions any disciples of Jesus, teaching in the temple, and "healing the sick" is dubious considering the etymology of our word deacon that Paul uses in Romans 15:8. Nevertheless, Paul doesn't say that Jesus was a "deacon" for the sick, but a "deacon" to the "circumcized".

Paul says that Jesus was "crucified by the rulers of this age" in 1 Corinthians 2:8